THE BLECH

released 6 LP/CD. Their albums have become a treasure-trove of extravagant, groovy dance hall artistry. In addition to their CDs, THE BLECH presented equally radical videoclips and unscrupulous live-shows – the already mentioned „treat for the eyes“.

The forcefulness with which THE BLECH flung their conviction from the stage into the audience was at once hypnotic, irritating and erotic. THE BLECH have been invited twice to „documenta Kassel“, played at Rock-, Jazz-, Punk,- and Contemporary Music-Festivals and they shared stage with Elvis Costello, Henry Rollins, Nick Cave, Herbie Hancock, Nina Hagen, Cecil Taylor, Einstürzende Neubauten, Elliott Sharp, Iva Bittova, Fred Frith, Chaka Chan, John Zorn, Arto Lindsay, Klaus Doldinger, Helmut Friedrich Lachenmann, Mauricio Kagel or Luciano Pavarotti and toured in North and South America, Japan, Russia, Siberia, throughout Europe and the Soviet bloc. The band has received international awards.

CHEERFULLY ACROSS THE ABYSS … AND BEYOND!

The German band THE BLECH became known when they came on the scene in 1985, using a combination of experiments with language and music, with a fondness for absurd plays on words. In subsequent years, the band developed these musical experiments into one of the few timeless approaches to pop music in Germany, which enjoyed worldwide acclaim. THE BLECH have helped to overturn an artistic millenium which, as a basis for the relationship between Man and nature, had clung to harmony.

THE ETERNAL ANTAGONISM

THE BLECH combines what appears to be uncombinable. Construction – destruction, chaos – control, aggression – beauty, they have unified all of these opposing poles into a hard, yet fantastic feeling. The ensemble created a large-scale, multi-level, paradoxical game employing a number of media in order to disappear behind the shrouds of their self-created confusion. Moving between dadaism and techno, U2 and Stockhausen, the rock music of THE BLECH is charged with multi-faceted meaningfulness. The thoughts they intend to provoke, however, are not guided along a fixed path, leaving room for freedom of choice among innumerable possible interpretations.

The room in which they rage as if obsessed, swirls and sways. A friend’s shoe lies dead on stage. Someone else is struck on the head with something hard. Enlightend by a vision, he spies the Virgin Mary as she stady lowers herself from the chandelier; A show for the primadonna’s pants, the lama’s tail at the zoo and for you“.

CULTURAL DECEPTION, EROTICISM AND SAUERKRAUT

Hubl Greiner explains the band’s definition of music as follows:

„We ask questions without knowing the answers. We love painting pictures with a view to challenging and provoking the viewer to derive his or her own answers. We call on the onlooker to participate in a creative process. We depict life as an insanely witty, simultaneous concert of murder, cultural deceit, eroticism and sauerkraut. We dissolve the eternal controversy of contrasts in laughter. We convinced the Virgin Mary to wed the devil.

Our show! It’s certainly not intangible but more like a „driving home“ of wedges, resulting in altercations between chair legs, bunches of keys and boot jacks.

The music of THE BLECH is the clamour, the screeching of the brakes which suddenly attacks those lost in the melody. The music shows an unscrupulous variety of colours, it takes life as it is, a mad simultaneous concert of murders, cultural lies, erotic and sauerkraut, it tears apart ethics and the lie of personal responsibility. This life also means lowness, rape and drunkeness – it is the eternal conflict of the contrasts. I have the opinion, that the instinct of mutual help is a throughout egoistic action.

I merely proceed from the assumption that life is an, in itself fighting, always moving incalculable row of phenomenons, equal to a department store, in which the signals´rattling never stops and in which moving stairs whiz through the floors. To fight is an obvious condition. To wish for paradise is a misunderstanding of life itself.“